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February 21, 2006
This excerpt is from the Introduction to Gregory Moore's Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor, which is reviewed here by Iain Morrison. Moore's book explores the historical influences operative on Nietzsche--it is a historical approach that demands a command of both Nietzsche and the relevant portions of the history of philosophy, religion and science.
In the Introduction Moore says that:
It is my contention that Nietzsche’s recourse to biological and medical idiom is both a reflection and an ironic distortion of this pervasive biologism, and can only be truly appreciated once the contemporary force and significance of his metaphor is reconstructed.
Moore situates Nietzsche’s thoughts in the context of two dominant trends in late-nineteenth century European intellectual life – evolutionary biology and fin-de-siècle theories of degeneration. He says that:
Nietzsche’s own writings bear witness to the extraordinary cultural impact of the biological sciences in the late nineteenth century. His work demonstrates not only a life-long fascination with the mechanisms of progress and decline, but also, his attacks on Darwin notwithstanding, a profound interest in the far-reaching implications of the modern evolutionary world-view for the traditional areas of philosophical inquiry. Indeed, the central project of his later thought---the much-vaunted '‘transvaluation of all values' --- rests precisely upon an appeal to the explanatory power of a newly confident biology to demonstrate the inferiority of prevailing ideals and to overturn them.
Philosophy is both historical, in the sense of being conducted according to historically determined canons, and itextual, in the sense of being concerned with a body of written artifacts. Moore emphasizes the extent to which Nietzsche's philosophy was developed in active correspondence with the scientific literature and debates of his age and so it makes him more a nineteenth century figure. Moore understasnds that biology had become a central t discourse of the latter half of the nineteenth century; the language and concepts of evolutionary theory (and its counterpart, degeneration) were disseminated beyond the boundaries of the rapidly specializing biological disciplines and into the wider debates of politics, ethics, aesthetics and epistemology. Thus Nietzsche's entanglement in, and reinterpretation of, biology, evolution and degeneration.
Now I 've always read Nietzsche's biology as not a biologism, due to the importance he placed on culture, shaping the development of individuals, the character---or person-oriented-- focus of Nietzsche's affirmative ethics as an ethics of virtue, his conception of the cultural criticism task of the philosopher as a 'physician of culture', and Nietzsceh as a precursor to the "life-philosophy" school.
So what is Moore saying?
Iain Morrison, argues that Moore's biological Nietzsche is based around two central arguments:
first, he [Moore] contends that Nietzsche developed his own theory of evolution which was, like so many other nineteenth-century evolutionary theories, anti-Darwinian. Second, Moore concludes that Nietzsche goes beyond his age primarily by turning Christian concerns with degeneracy, decadence and mental illness back upon Christianity itself.
I hold that Nietzsche's anti-Darwinianism is a form of vitalism, which is opposed to mechanism and is based on the metaphysics of process and becoming.
Morrison says that Moore's first argument is that:
Nietzsche’s theory of evolution, according to which the driving force in evolution is not natural selection or the struggle for existence, but the will to power. Moore tells us that Nietzsche differentiates the evolution of the strong and the weak. The evolution of the strong is a matter of the springing forth of isolated cases of intense complexity and individuality. Evolution then is the "sudden eruption of life’s creative energies" (p. 54). The weak evolve by gathering in increasingly large groups and reaching higher and higher levels of adaptation. One of their adaptive strategies is morality. Thus, the morality of the majority is herd morality, which is a pattern of habitual and heritable behavior promoting the continued survival of the social organism.
So will to power as Nietzsche's metaphysics of life is associated with intense complexity and individuality and the "sudden eruption of life’s creative energies". How then is this to be interpreted?
Moore does acknowledge Heidegger's interpretation. He says that one notable figure to take issue with what he dismissed as Nietzsche’s ‘alleged biologism’ was Martin Heidegger. He then quotes
Evolutionism becomes be the 'new faith' ,which was nothing but the ‘old faith’ dressed up in the fashionable vocabulary of the biological sciences. That may well be the case, but what is displaced by Moore's theistic conception of metaphysics----eg., pseudo-religious sciences or pseudo-scientific religions---is the Hegelian/Heideggerian understanding of metaphysics as the theoretical presuppositions of bios eg., a differential economy, or play, of forces
Moore, as a historian, downplays the way that for both Heidegger and Nietzsche, metaphysical thinking is the fundamental basis of Western thinking.
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